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Unions Look for New Life in World of Obama

Unions are looking to Barack Obama and rising economic anxiety to reverse organized labor’s long slide.

Through three decades of decline, union leaders have been predicting a renaissance that has not come. But labor invested more than $300 million to help elect Mr. Obama and enlarge the Democratic majority in Congress, and it expects both to enact legislation that will make it easier for millions of workers to unionize.

Skeptics say the outlook for labor is as bleak as ever. Business leaders and Congressional Republicans have vowed to block the new legislation, and Mr. Obama might want to avoid a bitter, divisive fight. What is more, corporate leaders say, a shrinking economic pie could work against union organizing as much as it could work in its favor.

“What’s happened with the United Auto Workers has undercut the whole argument that unions are a ticket to the middle class, that unions will lead you to a better life,” said Randel Johnson, vice president for labor policy at the United States Chamber of Commerce.

As part of the $17.4 billion auto bailout package, President Bush forced the United Automobile Workers, once America’s mightiest union, to accept a nearly 20 percent cut in hourly compensation. (The union says it will seek a better deal under President Obama.) The U.A.W. has shrunk to less than 500,000 members from 1.5 million in the late 1970s, as the proportion of American workers who belong to unions plunged to 12 percent from 24 percent.

“A lot of people see that the unions drove the auto companies off the cliff,” Mr. Johnson said. “That clearly has undermined the argument that unions are a way to a secure and better future.”

Charles B. Craver, a labor relations expert at George Washington University, said workers and unions across the country could learn a lesson from the auto workers and what he sees as their stubborn resistance to accept concessions to keep the carmakers competitive.

“What’s happened with the U.A.W. is their very success brought them to the brink of disaster,” Professor Craver said, referring to union members’ traditionally high wages and benefits. “What I feel like saying to the auto workers is, ‘Would you like no auto jobs and to work at Wal-Mart?’ ”

“It’s Samuel Gompers who said a century ago that the enemy of the worker is an unprofitable employer,” he added. “Unions have to work to make the company successful, and employers have to recognize the contribution of the worker.”

While union leaders’ optimism has proved excessive in the past, they say their optimism is justified this time. They say Americans may have reached a turning point in their attitude to union organizing. In the view of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s president, John J. Sweeney, rising frustration over stagnating wages, declining health and retirement benefits, and soaring chief executive salaries has shifted the political landscape in labor’s favor.

“People are economically pressed and are looking for solutions and protections for themselves,” Mr. Sweeney said. “Working people know they need more power to counter corporate power, and they understand that unions can provide that counterbalance.”

“Labor will have more influence now because the people we helped elect, the people America elected, were elected to help people who work after 25 years of a market-worshiping, trickle-down economy,” he said. “The discussion in America is no longer so much about national security or guns and gays. It’s about something that unions are incredibly important to — in the future, am I going to get a raise and will I get health coverage and a pension?”

The possibility of enacting the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier to unionize private-sector workers, is also crucial. Many labor leaders say the bill would help add millions of workers to union rolls.

Under the bill, employees could gain union recognition as soon as a majority signed cards saying they wanted a union. In a move that business and Republicans say would betray a basic American right, unions could bypass secret ballot elections.

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Corporate executives acknowledge that the bill will make it possible for unions to organize many workplaces, perhaps even banks, McDonald’s and Wal-Marts, that have largely been impervious to union drives.

“In a recession, workers are looking for stability and security, and that will cause a lot of them to turn to unions,” said Stewart Acuff, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s organizing director.

As proof, he pointed to several recent developments. At JetBlue, 1,800 pilots worried about their health and retirement benefits are scheduled to vote whether to unionize in January. After a 15-year effort to keep out a union, Smithfield Packing said this month that it would grant union recognition to 4,600 workers at its North Carolina pork-processing plant who just voted to unionize. Last month, the Pequot tribe granted union recognition to 2,600 dealers at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut.

Photo

John Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., with President-elect Barack Obama.Credit
Alex Brandon/Associated Press

Union leaders also note a Peter D. Hart poll, commissioned by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and conducted in December 2006, that found that 53 percent of the 808 nonunion, nonsupervisory workers surveyed said they would vote to unionize immediately if they could.

No one doubts that unions will survive in the public sector, where millions of teachers, firefighters and other public employees have unionized in recent decades. But labor’s survival in the private sector is more problematic — just one in 14 private-sector workers are in unions, down from two in five a half-century ago.

Over all, union membership has fallen to 15.7 million from 21 million three decades ago, although last year union membership jumped by 311,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some academics have called that a statistical fluke, but labor leaders say the increase was the result of their hard work in unionizing construction, health-care and government workers in a year when employment climbed to record levels.

John Engler, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, sees unions continuing to decline in numbers and bargaining power. He said the very success of unions in improving wages and working conditions over the decades has generally made them unnecessary.

“In the early part of the last century, workers had to deal with some horrific working conditions and work in an environment where there wasn’t anything close to the safety net that we have today,” said Mr. Engler, a former governor of Michigan. “In the sophisticated workplaces of the 21st century, you see management and labor often working closely together to beat the competition. When they’re doing that, the need for unions is obviated. And when management and unions are not working together, unions are not likely to succeed and not likely to survive.”

Mr. Engler cited some companies — Harley-Davidson, John Deere and Boeing — where he said unions were likely to survive because, despite occasional battles, they have worked with management to keep companies competitive and profitable. Without naming names, he pointed to other companies — most notably Detroit’s automakers — where the unions might not survive because they had demanded, and won, too much in wages and benefits, helping to make their employers uncompetitive.

“Unions are going to survive this downturn, but whether they survive as a significant social force depends,” said Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was on Mr. Obama’s short list for labor secretary. One possibility, he said, was that the Obama administration could help unions by trying to salvage the so-called Detroit model, seeking “to strengthen working families in a cold winter economically.”

The Detroit model grew famous after the U.A.W. and General Motors negotiated landmark contracts in the late 1940s and 1950s that led to generous wages and benefits and companies sharing their increased profits and productivity with their workers.

“The Detroit model used to mean the middle class for working families,” Professor Shaiken said. “What the Detroit model means for the future is being hammered out between these hardest of times and the promise of the Obama administration.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Unions Look For New Life In World Of Obama. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe